MSI Wind

MSI Wind

Mark: Very good

Date of report was: 2008/07/07, Was: Very bad

aka Medion Akoya

Mini-notebook with Intel ATOM CPU.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECsJIgP2qn0

Hard to get ecs 2.0 RC 5 to work, no LAN, no WLAN, no USB cam, no widesreen activator (no 1024X600, only 800X600, unsupported hardware) - but sound (Realtek ALC888 with uniaud 1.1.4RC5-6) and video (Intel GM950, VESA VB 3.0 with snap, full support with PANORAMA) OK.
BUT: very very often the wohle system messed up while booting with trap 0008.
More info: http://www.os2world.com/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,63/topic,1093.0/

Tried the Medion Akoya (rebranded MSI Wind) with eCS rc4: I had the trap 0008, too. It vanished completely when I disabled all of the USB drivers, which is of course a huge handicap. I discovered this by disabling everything and then enabling drivers consecutively. I'd like to see if the recompiled USB stack makes a difference...

ACPI/APM is working fine. Sound works via Uniaud but it crashes occasionally when playing sounds (system freezes) - both uniaud rc1.14 rc6 and uni32resync 1.0.4. Realtek LAN and Ralink WLAN do not appear to work with Genmac 2.2 in "UNSUPPORTED" mode nor does any native OS/2 driver exist. I tried drivers for various Windows versions which I found on the driver CD, as well as the latest drivers from the Realtek/Ralink homepages.

So it's relatively stable but frankly not very useful. Therefore I wouldn't mark it "very bad".

eCS Installation - tricky but should work reliably if you know how to do it.

USB & Hyperthreading - SMP kernel, ACPI in APIC mode + /CD switch; seems that some things only work with the new recompiled USB stack - which introduces new problems (system frequently freezes for a short time!?) though. Also, battery widgets work fine.

LAN - now supported "officially" by the RTL8169 driver (thanks to Yanagihara Nobuyuki and achain)

WLAN - works partly with patched Genmac driver (thanks to Willibald Meyer and me for the patch). You cannot search for hotspots and I've got disconnection problems in some networks (I have to investigate that...), works flawless in other networks however!

WinOS/2 & VDMs - side effect of ACPI in APIC mode. Don't know if there's any workaround. Haven't tried using a FreeDOS kernel or something yet. I read that this issue is resolved in newer ACPI releases (I've got 3.05, 3.09 is the latest).

SDL - all SDL (official package and Panorama SDL12.DLL) programs have a messed colour palette. Not so bad that most programs are unusable / games unplayable but still very annoying. Maybe I should write to the SDL and Panorama people. I haven't got the latest Panorama driver, so I'd like to hear what Sigurd says first.

Firefox - Browsing is damned slow. I know that Freetype slows it down but I've got a similar setup on my desktop machine with SeaMonkey and it's not that bad. The CPU is roughly the same speed and I've got the same problems when my Medion Akoya is connected via LAN (so it's probably no Wifi problem). I thought the new Gecko engine in Firefox 3 is faster? Also it simply crashes very often. Watching Youtube via "unofficial" Flash 7 is very slow, too. Haven't tried SeaMonkey yet.

Scrolling - mouse driver (AMouse) doesn't allow sliding on the right side of the trackpad to scroll - this is a very useful feature supported e.g. by most Linux distributions. I'm using an older tool called Hot Scroll to achieve a similar effect on OS/2. I configured it to scroll in a similar manner when I hold down the "Windows" key. Works nice with the WPS and some programs but has no effect on others (e.g. Firefox). Is there an alternative? The Nice WPS enhancer hasn't got the feature I need and the AMouse MB3-drag feature doesn't even work when I've got a 3-button mouse attached(?).

btw. Video performance is better than I thought. I guessed it's impossible to play a Divx video fullscreen because such things are very processor-intensive with the VESA driver but some days ago I tried to watch a movie on a Samba resource (server is my eCS desktop Smiley ) using WarpVision and it worked surprisingly good. Fullscreen and fluently - without any special options. The CPU load was only about 20% so I could even activate some filters.

one have to downgrade the ACPI 3.09 (included in RC5) to 3.05, otherwise /APIC switch will freeze the system. Don't fogert the ACPI switch: /CD!

Cheers

nickk 2008-09-12 01:54:52

About hotspot searching. This adapter seems to have strange behaviour also in linux (suse, which its shipped with). Generally you search hotspots in 'monitor' mode (in linux iwconfig mode monitor), but this adapter can search only in managed mode, but not in monitor. So, such wideknown linux wifi sniffers as kismet and other do not work with this adapter. But you can search hotspots manually by iwconfig mode managed + iwlist scan. So you may try to do smth similar with genmac.

Anyway, you can always replace realtek wifi in msi wind i.e. with intel. its ordinal minipci card. There are plenty info in net how to disassemble msi and replace the card.